CHAPTER IV

Studying the batter—Shocker a marvel—His system—Pennock’s style of pitching—His pitching rule—Hoyt weighs in with advice—Pitching to weakness and strength—Playing the comers—Mixing them up—Quinn a bluffer—How Hoyt uses his fast one.

One day last summer I happened to be standing by the news stand in the hotel lobby in Detroit when Urban Shocker came along.

He stopped to kid with me a bit, then turned to the attendant.

“Got any Chicago papers?” he asked.

The attendant handed him two papers.

“That all you got?” Shock persisted.

The attendant pulled out three or four more and finally furnished a complete set of all the morning and evening sheets for the day.

Shocker took them, then asked for Cleveland papers as well. He got these too, bought a cigar, and walked toward the elevator with a stack of papers under his arm that would choke a horse.

The news stand man watched him curiously, and turned to me when Shocker finally had disappeared.

“There’s a funny guy,” he commented. “Every day that egg is in town he comes over and buys newspapers from other towns. And he doesn’t want just one—he wants ’em all. Wonder what he does with ’em?”

“Maybe he’s saving them to paper his garage,” I suggested, and the news stand man laughed and forgot.

As a matter of fact I knew all the time what Shock had wanted of the papers. So did the other fellows on the club. Fellows who travel around together on a ball club year after year get to understand each other pretty well. You know each other’s little peculiarities too, and after a while you learn to know just about what a chap thinks or does or believes. Ever since Shocker joined the Yankees he has been known as a “newspaper hound,” and he’s gradually getting the other pitchers the same way.

For Shocker wanted those newspapers for a definite reason. He bought them for a purpose, and this is it.

Every one of those papers have sports pages which Shock studies carefully. In Detroit he bought Chicago and Cleveland papers because these were the towns where we were to play next, and the box scores of the teams in those towns told him a story. Day after day he pores over the box scores and newspaper accounts like a school kid over a lesson.

He notices which men on the opposing lineup are hitting and which ones are in a slump. He notes how they go against opposing pitchers—and being a veteran and well acquainted with the styles and types of the various pitchers, he can then get a pretty good line on what sort of pitching they are hitting.

Here’s the way he works.

Suppose we’re playing Cleveland in a day or two. Now everyone knows that ordinarily George Burns and Joey Sewell are dangerous hitters, and that Rube Lutzke and some of the other boys are not so hot with the stick. But Shocker, studying the box scores day after day, comes around the clubhouse with a different report.

“Well,” he’ll say, “I notice that Burns went hitless against Zachary the other day. Up three times for a horse-collar. Guess George is having a tough time with slow balls these days. (Zachary, we all know, is a slow ball pitcher.) Quinn beat him too a week ago. Maybe we better try George out on slow ones this trip.”

Or perhaps he’ll call attention to the fact that Rube Lutzke, normally a weak hitter, is having a spurt and is getting a lot of basehits. Perhaps he’ll come up with information that Luke Sewell (usually a corking thrower) has been a bit wild on his throws to second base for a few days or it may be some other trick information that he gleaned from the box scores.

But it’s all mighty valuable in the daily business of winning ball games.

The point of course is that to become a good pitcher a man must make a close study of opposing batsmen—and Shocker is one of the closest students you’ll find in the game today. Pitching after all, is about one-third arm work and two-thirds head work and the fellows who stick around longest are the pitchers who let their head take over the burden as much as possible.

Year after year you see pitchers like Alex and Jess Haines and George Uhle and Dutch Ruether and Shocker out there winning ball games. You don’t think they still have the fast breaking curve and the hop on their fast one that they once had, do you? No sir! They’re getting by on knowledge, making their experience and their observation pay dividends.

Good pitchers realize that every hitter who steps up there at the plate has a “groove.” That’s a particular spot where he likes to see the ball come. And the pitcher who pitches down the groove—“Down his alley” the boys say sometimes—is inviting trouble.

But every batter up there at the plate, no matter who he may be, has a weakness too. It may be a fast ball inside or a curve ball low and outside. It may be anyone of a dozen different things, but the point is that somewhere there’s a weak spot, and the good pitcher is always looking for it.

Herb Pennock is another smart pitcher and one day, riding along on the train, I heard him explain his pitching theory to a lot of young fellows. It was short and simple, but it was 100 percent correct.

“Get that first one over the plate,” Herb advised. “Then after that, make the hitter swing at his weakness and your own strength!”

What Herb meant was simply this. Every pitcher has one particular ball that he can pitch a little better than anything else in his assortment. Herb’s best ball, for instance, is an overhand curve that swishes up to the plate and breaks down and out. Hoyt’s best pitch, on the other hand is a fast ball. If you know anything about fast balls you know that they hop as they reach the batter. Hoyt’s fast one is a little different. It doesn’t hop, it jumps—that is it rises, and as a result is particularly effective.

Now the point is this. You watch Hoyt and Herb when they’re pitching and get a batter in the hole where he has to hit. Suppose he has two strikes and one ball for instance: or a three and two count. Or suppose the hit and run is on and the pitcher knows that the batter is going to hit the next one. Right there you’ll see Herb coming in with that overhand curve or Waite with his fast one. In other words as long as the hitter is going to swing, and they know it, they’ll see to it that he’s swinging at the best they have and not at a cripple. That’s good pitching judgment.

And by reason of good control they send that “best bet” zipping along to the batter’s weakness—inside, outside, high or low as the case may be.

Of course there are a few hitters like Cobb and Hornsby who have no real weakness. They hit anything, anywhere. One of the best laughs ever enjoyed in baseball was brought about by the young pitcher who walked into the clubhouse one day and announced very seriously that he had been studying the situation and at last had discovered Ty Cobb’s weakness.

“Boy, if you have you’re a wonder,” one of the veterans said. “What do you think it is?”

“Well,” the rookie replied, “so near as I can figure it out he has only one real weakness—that’s a base on balls!”

When a pitcher faces a hitter of that type, there’s only one thing to do. Give him the best you’ve got, and don’t make them too good. If you can make him hit at a bad ball the chances are he won’t hit it squarely. And if he refuses to hit and gets a base on balls it’s well to remember Whitey Witt’s old wise crack and laugh it off.

Whitey walked over to an opposing pitcher one day after I had walked four times in a row:

“That’s the way to pitch,” he agreed. “Better four balls for one base than one ball for four bases anytime!”

The smart pitcher is always trying to make the hitter swing at a bad ball. Fellows like Shocker and Pennock and Alex can play those corners to the width of a gnat’s eyebrow. In all the innings Alex pitched against the Yankees in the world series I don’t believe he threw two balls “down the middle.” And when he did the batter was so surprised that he couldn’t swing.

And don’t think that those corner pitchers don’t get on a hitter’s nerves after a while. They do. I guess I’ve looked over as many bad ones as any man in the business in my day and I know. There’s nothing more annoying in the world than to step up there at the plate and watch a pitch come floating up big as a balloon but too close or too far out to hit. You can see that it’s going to cut the corner, but you know that if you swing the chances are 75 out of 100 that you’ll foul it off, or pop it up or roll one to the infield. And if you let it go you know durn well it will be called a strike. After watching pitching of that sort through seven or eight innings you reach the state where you’ll swing at anything—which, of course, is just what the pitcher wants you to do.

One of the hardest things for the inexperienced pitcher to learn is when to take things easy and when to bear down. The greatest success of such pitchers as Matty and Three Finger Brown was their ability to judge pace—to take things easy when they had a chance, and then have plenty left to bear down when they had to.

You know one strike out with the bases full and two down is just as valuable as three strikeouts in a row with nobody on and a lot easier. Fans and pitchers new to the game are apt to judge pitching effectiveness by the number of strikeouts and the scarcity of hits in the box score. But the smart pitcher doesn’t pay any attention to these things. He takes the slant that it’s runs which win ball games and his idea to keep the hits from coming in the pinches. In my experience I’ve seen pitchers touched for ten or twelve hits and still pitch shutouts. And I saw little Emil Levsen of Cleveland hold the Yankees to two hits, and lose his game 2 to 0. Of course the fans think the twelve hit pitcher is lucky, while they moan about Levsen’s bad luck.

But the facts of the matter are that one pitcher had something when he needed it, and the other fellow failed after some great pitching, simply because he didn’t have the strength left to pull out of a pinch. And after you see things like that happen a dozen times a season you come to the conclusion that good pitching is pitching that prevents runs, regardless of base hits.

Another common fault with young pitchers is that they overwork a certain delivery. Perhaps they have a curve ball that’s particularly good, or a fast one. The tendency is to keep using that pitch all the time. And take it from me, if you keep using the same thing long enough the hitters will get wise, no matter how deceptive the delivery may be.

Waite Hoyt has a theory that he advances in all the Yankee confabs. “Let ’em see that good one once in a while just so they will know you have it, then put it back in the case until you need it” is Waite’s idea.

Hoyt, as I said before is a fast ball pitcher. Yet I’ve seen him go through a whole game and pitch only eight or ten fast ones in the entire nine innings.

He simply uses that fast one for bait. He shows it to the hitter now and then to let him know that the fast one is still there, then he goes ahead with his curve and half-speed stuff. The hitter gets set for a fast one that never comes, and pops out on half-speeders that catch him off balance. Of course, Waite has to use the fast one every now and then to keep them guessing, but it’s the other stuff that really does the business.

After all, successful pitching is pretty much a matter of keeping the hitter off balance. As long as the man at the plate can’t get set, he’ll never tear the cover off a ball or break any fences in the outfield. That’s the reason a slow ball is so effective. There’s nothing about a slow ball to fool any one. Most of them don’t curve, and a lot of them don’t even wobble. But they do throw a hitter off stride.

When Joe Bush was in form, he was one of the great change of pace pitchers. Joe threw with four distinct speeds. He had a fast one, a half-speeder, and a couple of varieties of slow pitches. And all thrown with the same motion.

When you’d get set for his fast one he’d cross you up with a slow one; or if you were looking for the slow one the chances are the half-speeder or fast ball would be on you before you could get your bat around. I’ve seen a lot of curves and a lot of fast ones; I’ve looked over a lot of trick deliveries of one sort and another and I’ve hit against pitchers who were supposed to have a lot of stuff.

But after all those years I’ve about decided that control and a change of pace are the biggest assets a pitcher can have, and curve balls be durned! And I do know this. A curve ball may bother an ordinary hitter, but if a man is a really good hitter it’s the old change of pace that causes him more trouble than all the freak deliveries in the world.

The whole secret of a successful change of pace is motion. Good pitchers throw their fast ones and their slow ones with absolutely the same motion. They have to—for hitters and coaches are constantly on the lookout for some little move that will betray the pitch before it comes.

Of all the pitchers in the leagues I don’t know one who has a smoother, easier motion than Sam Jones, now with the Washington Senators.

Sam is what we used to call “a motion picture pitcher.” His delivery is smooth, easy and graceful and he doesn’t vary a bit in anything he throws.

Old Jack Quinn of the Athletics is another man who has a delivery that’s a pippin. Jack isn’t so easy to watch as Sam. He pitches with more jerk and more effort. But as a bluffer he is in a class by himself.

Jack is one of the few remaining spit-ball pitchers. And he bluffs that spitter on every pitch. Yet he doesn’t actually throw it once in six times. Simply goes through the motions and then crosses up the hitter with something entirely different.

But to consider the whole thing briefly. After you’ve learned control you’ve taken the first step toward pitching.

Now all you’ve got to do is develop a curve ball, a fast one, and a change of pace.

Learn to mix them up to keep the hitter off balance.

Perfect a motion that’s smooth and easy and deceptive.

Study batters, until you know their hitting style, their little peculiarities and their weakness and strength.

Then, after all that, you’re ready to start in on the business of pitching.